Citizenship in Question
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introduCtion jacqueline stevens Citizenship Studies and Ambiguities of the Ascriptive Citizen Experiences such as those of Ace, a U.S. citizen deported from his own coun- try at age nineteen, rarely receive public attention (see the preface to this volume). Ad hoc reporting by the news media tends to cover such incidents as idiosyncratic horrors inflicted by an inept oﬃcialdom on an unwitting, unlucky individual lacking the wherewithal to set the rec ord straight. Readers or tele- vi sion viewers are led to believe that the events are anomalous errors amenable to correction. Stories such as ones titled “Wrongfully Deported American Home after 3 Month Fight” (Huus 2010) or “Texas Runaway Found Pregnant in Colombia after She Was Mistakenly Deported” (Dillon 2012) imply that if the individuals were more wealthy, or older, or just more articulate, or if the bureaucrat put some thought into her work, then such oddities would vanish altogether. The government would be using the legal deﬁnition of citizenship correctly, deporting only identiﬁable foreigners, and we would ﬁnd our tax- onomy of citizens, on one hand, and aliens, on the other, perfectly adequate for describing diﬀ er ent populations. One reason that these cases are not widely reported is that it is just as diﬃ- cult for journalists to produce evidence of a subject’s U.S. citizenship as it is for the citizens themselves. The putative citizen was not conscious at the moment